Interesting Commentary on “Your Dog Is Your Mirror”

Your Dog is Your Mirror: the emotional capacity of our dogs and ourselves, by Kevin Behan, New World Library
Review by Judith Poole

Behan’s book first came to my attention when I heard him being interviewed on a PBS station. His premise caught my attention and the more I listened to his interview, the more I felt that he was describing what it’s like to be kinesthetic. This is certainly not a sensitivity exclusive to dogs. However, there does seem to be a spectrum of kinesthetic sensitivity among different people. Further, there is little discussion about the kinesthetic sense, especially compared to the sense of taste, or smell, or touch.

There is a relationship between the kinesthetic sense and empathy which is not quite linear. To me, and I am a highly kinesthetic person, this sense refers to a degree of porousness in the aura, the bio-energetic field that surrounds and interpenetrates the body. An Image that comes to me is that of a cloth covering although that is not an exact analogy. If the weave of the cloth is loose the aura will be more porous. Conversely, a tight weave of the aura results in less information moving through the material.

A highly kinesthetic person easily picks up other people’s emotions from the field. Someone who is less kinesthetic will take in less information on that level.

People can feel empathy even if they aren’t kinesthetic. In my experience, empathy has more to do with identifying with the other person or group and “feeling for them”. These concepts are highly interrelated and so difficult to tease apart. It is possible to modulate one’s empathy be addressing the degree to which one is emotionally enmeshed with the other individual or group. So I would describe empathy as an emotional state while being kinesthetic is a sensory experience.

Based on what Kevin Behan had to say in his interview, I reserved a copy of Your Dog is Your Mirror from the public library. At this point I have only read the preface. Although Kevin is talking about the relationship between a dog and its owner, his description seems to me to be a perfect description of what it’s like to be kinesthetic. People of this sensory type are often described as being very sensitive. In my own experience, it took a lot of curiosity and asking open-ended questions before I discovered that every emotion I felt was not my own. In a group situation, especially with people out of touch with their own emotions, it was as if I were channeling those unidentified emotions through my own being. Once I learned that was what was going on, it began to be easier to tease apart the emotions I was experiencing. It became clearer when I was picking up on other people’s feelings. At the same time I learned that I was most vulnerable to feelings that were a match to unprocessed, buried feelings of my own.

This process is ongoing. After years of feeling varying levels of discomfort and insecurity in group situations to which I also had an affinity, it finally dawned on me that I had been channeling the insecurities of others around me and taking them on as my own. This recent revelation amused me since it followed by a dozen years the book I wrote (More Than Meets the Eye: Energy) about being kinesthetic and what can be done to address the downside of that. The downside of course is confusing the information absorbed with one’s own state. If one experiences an emotion, and asks oneself “Why am I feeling that emotion?” that very question makes one lose the objectivity needed to recognize that the emotion is being generated from the field.

On the other hand, once one recognizes the potential value of information that comes through this kinesthetic sense, that recognition converts sensitivity into a very useful tool. Over time, and with experience, one begins to trust that information. Rather than questioning or doubting oneself, information obtained kinesthetically becomes a useful basis for intuition.

Getting back to Your Dog is Your Mirror, it struck me that, at least in the preface, Behan is creating a primer not simply for dog owners. I’m naturally kinesthetic, so I don’t know. But reading this far arouses my curiosity. Is this a sense that can be developed further by those who don’t experience that level of sensitivity. My hunch is that the more grounded and the more centered in the heart center rather than the head, the more easily one would be open to receiving and processing information on this level.

21 responses to “Interesting Commentary on “Your Dog Is Your Mirror””

“Getting back to Your Dog is Your Mirror, it struck me that, at least in the preface, Behan is creating a primer not simply for dog owners. I’m naturally kinesthetic, so I don’t know. But reading this far arouses my curiosity. Is this a sense that can be developed further by those who don’t experience that level of sensitivity. My hunch is that the more grounded and the more centered in the heart center rather than the head, the more easily one would be open to receiving and processing information on this level.”

This is why someone like Pam Hogle will never understand how dogs really think (i.e., process information emotionally rather than mentally), no matter how logical an argument you give her. She thinks she has “seen for herself” that dogs are capable of mental thought processes. No amount of logic, or even scientific evidence to contrary, will dissuade her.

From what dhe says here, I think Ms Poole has nailed the subject matter of Kevin’s dog behavior squarely on the head. With respect to early commenters on this Poole post, I cannot see why LCK misses this, and I agree totally with John’s idea.

I see no light between kinesthesia and proprioception, a physiological term, which from the Wiki is: “the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement.[1] It is distinguished from exteroception, by which we perceive the outside world, and interoception, by which we perceive pain, hunger, etc., and the movement of internal organs.”

Proprioception is empathy with our own bodies, which are our existential rootedness in nature.

For NDTers who know me, I have previously recommended the work of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, whose natural ‘philosophy of organism’ gives a grand picture of the role of emotion in the universe. His keen insight into the nature of reality leads him to say that “Nature is an ocean of feelings.” His term, ‘prehension’ – a feeling of and /grasping of other feelings – is precisely what Ms Poole describes in her post on kinesthesia. ANW often calls prehension ‘non-sensory perception,’ but this is primarily to make an important point to philosophers who only ever discuss the highly conceptual cognition we humans are able to exercise over data received from the 5 exterioceptive senses. (Interioception is close to Kevin’s ‘brain in the gut’ – the feeling of our organs).

Whitehead often brought up physiology when describing how we experience reality first and foremost as “withness of the body,” which I have come to understand as the interplay of the three perception modes I quoted from the Wiki above. ANW’s prehension includes all three modes of perception, and these feelings are responsible for our mentality seen as affective cognition, which also includes basic concept formation essential for creatures to move and act within their umvelts. More complex brain structures naturally allow for more complex conceptualizations to emerge in various species.

I recently emailed an essay that summarized much of what I have come to understand about ANW and emotion, and kindly would ask Kevin to post it in some manner for NDT readers – I think it can bring clearer insights for the discussion of emotion in nature.

Alfred North Whitehead (ANW) says Nature is an organism alive as an ‘ocean of feelings’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead Nature is an organic whole from quarks to creature consciousness (which itself is a feeling). All creatures are on a continuum, differing by degree only in how they take in their umvelt.

ANW’a most infamous and important coined term is prehension. Prehensions are how antecedant factors or objects in the environment are presently taken-in, grasped, or felt by an acting subject. A subject prehends an object when it experiences the object — when it perceives, feels or otherwise takes it into account. The ‘stuff’ of a prehension is affective tone — energy for non-mental entities, feelings/emotion for mental subjects. Their role in the Universe is to facilitate the immanence among things.

But prehensions need not be conscious activity, and they are the main stuff of what our animal unconscious psychology is about. They also occur at lower levels of nature, as when cells feel and take account of their environment of other cells and inorganic particles, and also when sub-atomic events ‘feel’ and react to the just-goings-on of similar energetic entities.

Another catchy phrase of Alfie’s is ‘perception in the mode of causal efficacy,’ which is non-sensory perception, as compared to the sense perceptions – sight, sound, taste/smell, and touch. Non-sensory perception is by far the more ubiquitous mode of perception in nature: atoms, cells, trees, and many lower animals have no eyes, ears, or noses, yet they take-in their umvelt. And we humans are only infrequently consciously using our external sense awareness.

Perception and memory are the primary types of creature prehension, both of which Charles Hartshorne, a follower of ANW, says are “intuitions of the past.” For ANW. the present occasion is brief and CLOSELY bounded by an immediate past and future. He often uses speech to exemplify this idea, as well as how the past is immanent in the present (future w/r just past). Before we finish a sentence, the first words are already in the past and grasped as consciously present via prehension. ANW says ‘we finish sentences because of our past urge to start them’ – this urge retains its causal grip, its immanence into its future.

Examples of non-sensory bodily perception are our short and long term memories; interioceptive sensation of organs such as toothaches, strained muscles, indigestion, flutters of the heart; and the proprioceptive feelings of movement and balance, like the flow as we dance.

Anthropocentric tendencies in science and philosophy have largely ignored non-sensory perception preferring the more clearly illuminated conscious awareness and reasoning associated with our external data as perceived via the 5 senses known as exterioception.

ANW holds that the characteristics of life are ‘absolute self-enjoyment, creative activity, and aim’ – things of which science remains silent because science only deals with half the evidence given to human experience – that of rational mentality – largely ignoring the emotional affects of our animal embodiment.

ANW criticizes the Newtonian-Humean legacy to modernity as what he calls ‘nature lifeless.’ The excessive abstractions, such as instantaneous (durationless) time and simple point location of vacuous, billard ball particle matter gave us Newton’s laws – like that of gravity as force between masses – but gave no explanatory reason as to what, how, or why. Likewise, Hume locks us in a Nature with only the bare sensa of sense perception which do not provide the data necessary for their own interpretetion.

The agency of non-sensory perception for causing past events to become immanent in the present is the very causality Hume did not see: What Hume considers as the ‘force and liveliness’ of character transmitted between separate but successive sense perceptions is de facto recognition of the immanence of the past in the future. This is the necessary continuity of transmission of energy/affective tone in Nature -– causality.

Jaak Panksepp is a neuroscientist who offers affective neurophysiology to explain our common mammalian emotional behaviors and who has stunningly discovered an affective state called SEEKING, wherein we are alive aimless and appetitively poised for novelty, for enjoyment. Jaak sees emotions as the number one causal agent of organisms, as did ANW.http://www.viddler.com/explore/npsa/videos/26/

Neuroscientists like Churchland and Panksepp know the importance of emotion in our mental experience, unlike the unfeeling non-rational creatures of DesCartes With both Hume and Whitehead, all would now agree that as we observe similarities in behaviors among animals, we can assume the creatures have subjective experiences much like ours, all SEEKING ‘absolute self-enjoyment, creative activity, and aim’ while sharing in a ‘nature alive.’

It seems to me that the only training methodology rooted in non-sensory perception is NDT. And the immediate-problem with Panskepp is that he is only studying the brain, and thus will miss what lies underneath the seeking response. Reread chapter eight in YDIYM on the puppy evolving into the group mind. What I’m trying to show here is that individual behavior is not predicated on self actualizing, or on the experience of pleasure or novelty seeking, but on returning to the feeling of weightlessness, and along the way this effects a group consciousness through the emotional affects of physical memory.

Thanks, Kevin, for posting “Whitehead and Animal Emotion” for your readers – I hopeafraid they find it easily.

A few remarks on your comment of 8/25/11 at 12:13 pm:

KB: It seems to me that the only training methodology rooted in non-sensory perception is NDT.

B: Yes.

KB: And the immediate-problem with Panskepp is that he is only studying the brain, and thus will miss what lies underneath the seeking response.

B: Panksepp’s work is not about training, as you are aware. But, he is well aware that the brain is at the apex of the CNS of creatures and that it is where our entire embodied network of nerve signals are developed into complex emotions that underlie organism behavior.

KB: Reread chapter eight in YDIYM on the puppy evolving into the group mind.

B: Because I am vision-impaired, I am no longer very able to read book print – I can use computer font enlargement to see info on the internet, so, unlike when I did read your 1st book a decade back…

KB: What I’m trying to show here is that individual behavior is not predicated on [to found or base something on] self actualizing, or on the experience of pleasure or novelty seeking

B: Let me be clear, for Churchland, Panksepp, Solms, Whitehead, and other naturalists, these items are not conscious ‘goals’ that animals (us included) set for themselves: rather, they are, so to speak, commonly observable in the processes of living nature. Evolution to better stuff comes about by maximizing adversions over aversions.

B: This is totally what Panksepp calls the fundamental mental affect, SEEKING, which I understand to be a preconscious, ambiguous state of being alive, aimless, appetitively poised for anything that aewaits. Upon encountering the next thing (no conscious time-keeping here), any of a myriad of emotional states will be aroused. You two are in complete agreement on this mental state. And note the resonance of the above with what ANW holds as the characteristics of life -‘absolute self-enjoyment [adversion over aversion], creative activity [especially evident in PLAY, not so in operant conditioning], and aim [appetitively poised]’.

KB along the way this [returning to weightlessness] effects a group consciousness through the emotional affects of physical memory.

B: From the cradle (and wolf-den) we are relational, and the medium of relation is shared emotional affect.

I submit, Kevin, that however, or whoever it was that you were turned off of the relevance of Panksepp’s affective neuroscience to your ideas, you should re-eveluate. I believe you have indicated that you can also see how ANW is likewise your strong ally.

I’m not sure I have any philosophical disagreement with ANW or exactly how I stand in the philosophical scheme of things because I’m not well read or particularly apt in the subject. I rely on others’ interpretations. What I do know is the base root of consciousness by way of interpreting the animal mind as a function of the immediate moment, and so this reveals to me that behavior subscribes to the principles of nature, i.e. energy and so I believe this is where we tend to get hung up. I’m making a distinction between emotion and instinct, and between thoughts and feeling. The affects related to emotional experience make us feel and then act just as if we are gravitationally, electrically and magnetically charged. This orientation is the basis of complex behavior that plays out intelligently over time, and social organization that expertly exploits nature, because nature of course is constituted according to these same principles of energy. All the neuro-imaging and reductionist research has so far failed to intimate this process and so I take exception to how Panskepp interprets his findings, although I believe that in the final analysis his work does indeed support what I’m saying. It doesn’t get us down to rock bottom.

I am not up on neurochemistry and how various chemical molecules at synapse gaps modulate the electrical neural firing to create emotional affects. Also there are glial cells that wrap around neurons and impact the waveform of the electrical energy (what ANW refers to as affective tone) in such a way that gives rise to complex affects. Likewise, there is a mix of electrical and chemical activities where the nerve paths originate deep in our animal bodies. Neuroscients like Damasio, Candell, Panksepp, Ramakrishnan all study this stuff.

Mow consider what I find to be one of ANW’s most engeging insights: “The energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life.”

Restated, energy is to particles in physics and inorganic chemistry what emotion is for biological organisms. Thus, the ‘affective tone’ of the physical energy (electrical, gravitational) in atoms and computers is different from that of biological creatures whose own physical energy is modulated via complex organic chemical structures, like mentioned above.

So, when I used to say – a dog (or a human) is like a cell phone. The latter device’s energetics have a very different affective tone than the emotional affects of the former creatures. On a continuum with the behavior of cell phones at one end and humans at the other, the dog behavior is very much like ours, and very little like our electronics. This goes for how each takes in and responds to all natural forces.

II don’t see it that animals act like cell phones, rather everything, animal, people and cell phones alike, are “designed” in response to energy. It’s the most conservative interpretation of the evidence. Thus, when someone is defensively agitated or I should say, senses that they are disconnected from their surroundings, they act just like an electrically charged particle, when someone is sexually aroused they act just like a magnetically charged particle. This is far more fundamental than Panskepps’ affective responses (seven I believe it was he enumerated). What this means in the big cosmic scheme of things I don’t know, I just know it allows us to build a model for animal consciousness and this would place I believe, the scientific research into a better framework of understanding than it is in at the moment.
In regards to the distinction you’re making above

“Thus, the ‘affective tone’ of the physical energy (electrical, gravitational) in atoms and computers is different from that of biological creatures whose own physical energy is modulated via complex organic chemical structures, like mentioned above.”

What I’m arguing is that the biochemistry/neurology in conjunction with anatomical structure and physical motion, (by way of physical memory of experiencing motion and resistance to motion in Pavlovian imprinting) make the chemical and neurological affects just the same as gravity and electromagnetism.

“What I’m arguing is that the biochemistry/neurology in conjunction with anatomical structure and physical motion, (by way of physical memory of experiencing motion and resistance to motion in Pavlovian imprinting) make the chemical and neurological affects just the same as gravity and electromagnetism.”

When an animal perceives something, the way its mind first processes this object, is by way of a physical memory of motion and resistance to motion that was imprinted via Pavlovian conditioning in the earliest phases of its life. The interplay between its neurology and physiology in a given experience, is then framed by its anatomy, given that its physical center of gravity (the “emotional quanta”) is where the animal directs its attention as it masters the mechanics of locomotion. It never outgrows this perspective and experiencing reality through this process, motion and resistance to motion is transformed into internal affects that feel just as if electromagnetic forces are acting within and upon its body. In my view, the main function of the brain and the body is to create feelings that mimic these natural forces. Thus, interacting with its surroundings induces in the animal feelings of gravitational mass, resistance, electrostatic pressure or magnetic alignment and acceleration. In other words, when two animals interrelate, they in effect create a virtual electromagnetic dynamo in the other, and they then respond to each other via these feelings of natural forces. They understand each other in terms of these internal affects, and these affects have a ready meaning independent of experience. The animal literally feels pulled or pushed, and encounters resistance, just as if it’s living in a virtual force field and experiencing internal currents. The most important meaning occurs if they can sustain in each other those feelings of magnetic pull and acceleration because these can lead to the most pleasurable feeling, that of weightlessness, and this recreates the emotional experience of oneness in the womb. The object of all behavior is to get back to weightlessness, and along the way in that quest, organisms form complex social structures.
Perhaps the best evidence of this phenomenon guiding complex interactions is how emotional beings become each others’ emotional mirror in deference to Newtons 2nd law of motion, i.e. every action has an equal and opposite reaction. My proposition is that the brain and the body is an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic in service to a network consciousness. What this might mean in the grand cosmic scheme of things we are all free to speculate, but on the tangible plane it allows us to construct a model for the animal mind so that the debate can then proceed on that platform, just as the concept of the quanta enabled science to construct a model for what’s going on within the atom as a means of getting to the next paradigm in science.

I see kinesthesia, empathy, and proprioception all as similar (not identical) things: feelings of feelings – prehensions. In my essay Kevin posted, I link to ANW’s online Modes of Thought book (one of his most readable and last works), and I will paraphrase a portion in which he discusses how mutual immanence (presence of one in another) is fostered by prehension. Remember ANW views reality as a manifold of inter-relating entities, and even these entities are inter-related sub-societies (like your body).

“Experience of the world involves the exhibition of the soul/psyche itself as one of the components within the world. There is a dual aspect: the subject’s experience itself and the experienced world itself. The world is included within the experience in one sense, and the experience is included in the world in another sense. For example, I am in the room, and the room is an item in my present experience. But my present experience is what I now am.

Consider the enduring self-identity of the soul. The soul is nothing else than the succession of my occasions of experience, extending from birth to the present moment. Now, at this instant, I am the complete person embodying all these occasions. They are mine. On the other hand it is equally true that my immediate occasion of experience, at the present moment, is only one among the stream of occasions which constitutes my soul. Again, the world for me is nothing else than how the functionings of my body presents it for my experience. The world is thus wholly to be discerned within those functionings. Knowledge of the world is nothing else than an analysis of the functionings. And yet, on the other hand, the body is merely one society of functionings within the universal society of the world. We have to construe the world in terms of the bodily society, and the bodily society in terms of the general functionings of the world.”

I see what you are getting at, but I think it overlooks the existence of emergence – the parts support but do not add up to the whole. My (and I think Peanut’s) experiences of our environment are far advanced from the rudimentary physical forces that undergire all existence. We certainly have glimpses of these primitive non-living forces in our miore evolved living experiences and we can see there effect on many of our everyday expressions (I feel weighted down – burdened – the movie was electrifying…

But as I have mentioned before, electricity is to my feeling of joy, pain, etc., what computer CPU bits are to a spreadsheet.

I would say that the emergence of something novel arises not without precedent, but from a state of synchronization between things, and this is predicated on the brain and body in their interplay producing these virtual forces so that two individuals can sync up or an individual can attain resonance with its surroundings. I think it is also inaccurate to see the new function as having arisen without precedent, which leads us to believe the sum is greater than the parts in the sense that the sum isn’t related to the parts. What I mean is that consciousness has solved the unified field problem (Penfield argue for this as well). In other words, the basic components of an organism, have microscopic processes at the level of single electrons and these work according to quantum mechanics. So if there is a unified field, this means that organisms evolved in response to the unified field, not solely in response to the processes of nature as we perceive it on the macroscopic level and which we then believe is the sole focus of genetic selection. This then means that consciousness can convert gravity (whatever that is) into electromagnetism and back again, and in defiance of our human intellectual notion of Time because as Einstein proved, Gravity, Time and Space are inseparable. So in the imprinting process by way of Pavlovian conditioning that I propose, the animal’s sense of its self is composed by importing objects of attraction into it’s conscious awareness and feeling as if these are directly affiliated with its physical center-of-gravity. The stronger the force of desire (hunger) the stronger the affiliation of the external with the internal fusing these two into one composite value that is thereafter felt internally. So the electromagnetic energy of physiological and neurological function becomes indelibly associated with an animals’ sense of its center mass. Also due to this, when an object of attraction moves, its mass and acceleration is converted into even more neurochemical (electromagnetic) energy. Thus mass (resistance to acceleration) is converted into electromagnetism in the form of consciousness. So when an animal perceives an object of attraction, it feels accelerated neurologically and physically and this knocks it out of stasis.
Furthermore, I see a logical problem with taking the current emergence idea of the sum greater than the parts as if the sum is unrelated to the parts, in that this then means that all animals are not necessarily connected. In other words, unless everything about their physical and neurological makeup is 100% identical, then something in their consciousness could have emerged out of nowhere and be wholly unrelated to other forms of life. So I think this is a good clue that the emergence idea is not an objective way of looking at the animal mind, given that all animals in my view are operating according to the same operating system of emotion.
I would call your attention to the work of

I should have added that if the syncing up process isn’t in place, and to repeat is based on feeling these virtual natural forces, then the same stimuli and/or context can have diametrically opposed impacts on the individual, and this is presented to the animal mind before there is any input from whatever rational faculty any given individual might be endowed with.

Burl, I agree to a point. Feelings of feelings, sort of. I don’t have the time to get into this discussion in a thorough manner so just a few very brief thoughts to clarify my objection.

Empathy arises from heart and is projected outward through action and words.

Kinesthesia has an absorbing action. It often occurs without conscious thought, but I can also consciously use it. It has led to things such as feeling others physical pain in the same places in my body as their’s before they spoke of it. This has included animals. I think it is also the walking into an empty room feeling and knowing something terrible happened there a short time before. I think most people can do that. i.e the air was thick with something

Proprioception has to do with balance and unless one is riding a horse it is an internal experience not shared with another. Staying upright, picking up objects, or not knocking one’s head into things, kind of situations.

Crystal: Proprioception has to do with balance and unless one is riding a horse it is an internal experience not shared with another. Staying upright, picking up objects, or not knocking one’s head into things, kind of situations. I will read your essay at another time when I can take it in.

B: Kinesthesia and proprioception are alike in they are prehensive activities, which involves subject taking-in object (in a sense, external becomes immanent in internal). In the case of kinesthesia and empathy, the ;object’ is another creature, while for proprioception, it is our own body being prehended.

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